Why Happiness Scares Us

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Today (March 20) is the United Nations-sponsored International
Day of Happiness. But for many people, joy is less a reason to
celebrate and more a trigger of fear.

Aversion to happiness exists across cultures, especially those
that value harmony and conformity over individualism, recent
research suggests. The findings challenge the Western assumption
that everyone is aiming for a
life full of unremitting joy.

"In reality, some people don't want to be happy, and especially
extremely happy," said Dan Weijers a postdoctoral fellow in
philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Weijers co-authored a review of anti-happiness research with
rellow Victoria University of Wellington researcher Mohsen
Joshanloo.

The researchers find that reasons for avoiding happiness are
varied: Some people fear too much happiness will bring sorrow,
while others consider happiness a
shallow, vapid emotion.

Ranking happiness

Happiness is a hot topic for social scientists and policy makers
alike. Following the lead of the small nation of Bhutan, whose
governmenta tracks Gross National Happiness, some organizations
and agencies are making citizen happiness a priority, similar to
progress rankings such as Gross Domestic Product. Similarly,
happiness rankings of countries are a dime a dozen. Starting in
2012, the United Nations got in on this game with a scientific
ranking of happiness across nations. In 2012 and 2013,
Denmark ranked happiest. The United States was the 17th-happiest
country in 2013. [ 5
Wacky Ways to Measure Happiness ]

These efforts gloss over cultural differences in happiness,
Weijers told Live Science. Comparing happiness between cultures
runs into the problem of how different people define the emotion.
And major policy efforts might run up against trouble if citizens
aren't on board.

"In the United States, such measures might be lambasted for being
ineffective or against individual liberties," Weijers wrote in an
email to Live Science. "But, in other cultures, such efforts
would also be seen as inherently corrupting, because they aim to
have the negative effect of making people joyous."

Avoiding joy

Joshanloo and his colleagues studied fear of happiness across 14
countries, publishing their work online in October 2013 in the
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. They found some fear of
happiness across all nations, but the aversion was strongest in
East Asian and other "collectivist"
cultures, which tend to value the group over the individual.
For example, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong and Japan all scored high
on the fear of happiness measurements.

In contrast, less conformist cultures studied were less likely to
shy away from happiness. New Zealanders were not very afraid of
happiness, the researchers found, and Brazilians were even less
so.

"United States and Canada were not included in the study, but
given the individualistic culture in these nations, it seems
likely that North Americans would not be very afraid of
happiness," Weijers said. [ 7 Things That
Will Make You Happy ]

Why fear happiness? Some cultures think of happiness as a loss of
control — fun, but destructive, like being drunk, Weijers
said. Others believe extreme highs must be followed by extreme
lows, as revealed by proverbs from many nations. In Iran, people
say that "laughing loudly wakes up sadness." In China, a cheerful
person might be warned, "Extreme happiness begets tragedy." In
English-speaking nations, you might hear, "What goes up, must
come down."

Islamic cultures value sadness over happiness, Weijers said,
because sad people are seen as serious and connected to God.
Artists might fear that soothing their emotional torment will
destroy their creativity (and, indeed, creativity has been
scientifically linked to mental illness ). Activists might see
happiness as complacency and seek to rouse anger, instead.

And sometimes, Weijers said, it's not the feeling of happiness,
but the expression, that seems troubling. If two friends enter a
contest and one wins, the victor might tamp down his or her joy
to make the loser feel better.

Basic happiness?

The findings call into question the notion that happiness is the
ultimate goal, a belief echoed in any number of articles and
self-help publications about whether certain choices are
likely to make you happy.

The research also highlights the alterable definition of
"happiness." Cultures may not agree on what true happiness is. In
a 2013 study, published in the journal Personality and Social
Bulletin, scientists examined dictionary definitions of happiness
across time and nations. The researchers also analyzed U.S.
presidents' State of the Union addresses and scoured Google's
Ngram viewer, which allows analysis of words in Google books over
time, for mentions of happiness.

That study researchers found that most nations in the past
defined happiness as a factor of good luck and fortunate
circumstances. Modern American English, however, stresses
happiness as an internal mood, something more innate to a person
and his or her character than to the external world. Bolstering
the evidence of this change, the researchers found that mentions
of a "happy nation" have declined over time in English-language
books, while the phrase "happy person" has been climbing
steadily.

The switch from happiness as external to internal picked up in
the United States around the 1920s, the researchers found. This
was a time often considered the beginning of modernity. Several
other nations have picked up the "happiness as internal" usage,
too.

As with Weijers' and Joshanloo's work, this study has its own
implications for ranking world happiness.

"Germans, Russians, Japanese, Norwegians and many others might be
thinking about how
lucky they have been lately when they answer [questions about
happiness]," the researchers warned. "Whereas Americans, Spanish,
Argentine, Ecuadorians, Indians and Kenyans are not."